Electronic mail has become a widely used business communication and organization application. The use of email has proliferated well beyond the simple act of sending and receiving messages. Email is currently used as a platform for meeting coordination and resource sharing. Additionally, applications like electronic calendars and planners are widely used alone and with email. There are a number and variety of interactive electronic calendaring systems and methods currently available to email users. The objective of all of these systems is primarily to assist the person who, for a number of different reasons, maintains a calendar of future events containing various information about the events at entry points on the calendar, which relate to the time of the event. The events (or calendar items) have a number of different parameters (e.g., location, time, resources, attendees, invitees, etc.) that help define the event.
The increased availability and usefulness of personal computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and intelligent workstations in recent years has made it possible for calendar owners to establish and maintain these calendars on these interactive type data processing systems. Hence, the term “electronic calendaring systems.” Electronic calendaring systems are also referred to sometimes as calendar applications.
Calendar applications can be used to schedule meetings or other types of calendar items with other participants. An invitation for the meeting is usually sent to the invited participants (invitees) via email or some other known communication modality. The invited parties can then decide if the proposed meeting time works for them. Often with a large number of invitees there will be at least one invitee that cannot make the meeting due to a prior commitment. At this point the invitee can respond to the invitation and tell the meeting originator that he/she cannot make that meeting. The originator then has to decide whether to continue with the meeting as planned without the invitee or to reschedule the meeting to accommodate for the invitee. If the originator decides to reschedule the meeting there is a likelihood that the new meeting time will conflict with another invitee's schedule. Thus, this process of negotiating a meeting time can be very cumbersome and time consuming. The process can become even more complicated in the event that the originator is attempting to schedule a recurring meeting (e.g., a weekly meeting for the same participants). Recurring meetings are very common in the business world as it provides a time for a certain number of people to know they will meet regularly to discuss various important issues.
Today, most calendar applications provide assistance in scheduling a single occurrence meeting. This is made possible when all potential invitees to a meeting make their schedule publicly available. This way a potential meeting originator is able to know, a priori, what times will likely work and not work for potential invitees based on their published schedule. When attempting to schedule a single occurrence meeting, some calendar applications can compare the availability of all invitees to determine what earliest time is available for the entire population of participants (i.e., originator and invitees). This earliest time is suggested to the originator who can ultimately determine whether the suggested time will work for the meeting.
Although calendar applications can assist an originator in scheduling a single occurrence meeting, there is no solution currently known that assists an originator in scheduling a recurring meeting. The difficulty with scheduling a recurring meeting is typically not scheduling a first in the set of the recurring meetings. The difficulty is in scheduling the meetings that succeed the first meeting. Recurring meetings generally have a predefined periodicity requirement (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.). It is quite difficult to schedule multiple meetings with a predefined periodicity requirement for multiple participants. It becomes even more difficult to schedule such a meeting if some or all of the participants are relatively busy people that have a number of other previous commitments. The typical approach used today when scheduling a recurring meeting is to manually look out a few weeks in all of the participants' schedules to look for common availabilities between all participants. A time is chosen for that week, then the originator has to look out to the next period (e.g., the following week) for each participant to see if the chosen time will work in the following week. This process is continued for as long as the recurring meeting is desired to last. If the originator gets to say the third period and determines that the first chosen meeting time will not work in the third week, then the originator must go back to the first week to choose an alternative time for the first meeting. After an alternative time is chosen the originator repeats the steps of checking each successive period to see if the chosen time will work in each period for all participants. This particular scheduling approach is very time consuming and prone to errors. Moreover, manually choosing a meeting time that works for a large group of invitees and/or relatively busy invitees can be very difficult if not impossible. Specifically, there may not be any one meeting time during each period (e.g., every Wednesday at 3:00 pm) that will work for all participants.